Don't Call It a Rebrand: The NHL's Coyotes Turn to Overlooked Fans for Survival

The National Hockey League’s Coyotes have been in Arizona for a quarter of a century. Yet even their front office knows the team has little to show for it. The franchise moved to Arizona in 1996 after playing the previous 24 years in Winnipeg, Canada as the Jets. Since then, the Coyotes have gone bankrupt. They’ve been owned by the league. The team has called two different arenas home, and was nearly moved to both Hamilton, Ontario, and Seattle. They can’t blame the desert for their troubles either: Warm weather teams from Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Dallas and Las Vegas have all either been to or won the Stanley Cup Final (multiple times, in some cases) since the Coyotes arrived in Arizona. The Coyotes have made the playoffs just nine times during their years in Arizona. Perhaps as a result, they have had such poor attendance that Glendale—their host city—is evicting the team in 2022, adding yet another layer of uncertainty and misfortune to the NHL franchise. Even worse, the Coyotes could be thrown out as early as Dec. 20 for nonpayment of $1.3 million in taxes and fees. https://twitter.com/GlendaleAZ/status/1428446762340028420 The team has been trying to build a new $2 billion arena and mixed-use development on a waste disposal site in Tempe. Not only has this upset nearby Sky Harbor Airport, which says such development would interfere with its flight pattern, but it only bolstered rumors that the team might move to another city. The owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets is actively seeking an NHL team for his hockey-ready Toyota Center, and rumors have connected the Coyotes to that plan. Addressing past neglect Off the ice, the Coyotes outright ignored perhaps the largest segment of their marketplace. According to Census data, roughly 42% of Phoenix’s population is Hispanic or Latino. In Glendale, it’s roughly 38%. According to market research firm Morning Consult, of NHL fans with a “very favorable view” of the Arizona Coyotes, just 25% are Hispanic or Latino. By comparison, 26% of Hispanic or Latino hockey fans held a similar view of the Coyotes’ northern replacement, the newest incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets. “It's been dysfunctional, it's been unstable, and it's been not present,” Coyotes president and CEO Xavier A. Gutierrez told Adweek. “We’re saying, ‘Let's be present, let's acknowledge, let's be intentional.’” Gutierrez outlined the ideas of how the Coyotes plan to refurbish the team’s image and appeal to Latino and Hispanic fans, vowing “to be authentic, and to be innovative in our outreach and in how we present ourselves as an organization [by] fully acknowledging that we make mistakes and fully acknowledging that we are in that learning curve." NFL’s Raiders Rebuild Their Fanbase After a Lonely First Year in Vegas Meeting the neighbors Coyotes management wants to change the team’s legacy in Arizona, and it wants marketing to lead the way. When he took controlling interest in the Coyotes in 2019, billionaire Alex Meruelo sent a message in his opening statement: “Estoy aquí para ustedes. Quiero que me acompañen…” (“I'm here for you. I want you to join me…”) As part of what Gutierrez and the Coyotes marketing team have dubbed a “rebrand,” the organization announced it was bringing back its white jersey and kachina logo not only as a nod to longtime fans, who voted it the best in the state, but as a symbol of diversity (though local Hopi tribe members disagree). They pulled in MullenLowe and director Airton Carmignani to make a 60-second “anthem” spot focusing less on hockey and more on rodeo, roller skating, lowriders, local restaurants and the cultural richness of their surrounding community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6oCvVtgJv8 “Hockey’s future growth will be fueled by the deeply authentic relationships we are creating today within our increasingly diverse local communities,” said Kim Davis, the NHL’s senior evp of social impact, growth and legislative affairs. “This anthem represents a shift occurring within the Coyotes organization—and the NHL more broadly—that challenges traditional models of doing business and illustrates intentionality behind their outreach to new demographics by representing the multitude of faces, voices and perspectives within the brand.” For the Coyotes to survive in Arizona, Guttierez said the club can no longer view its Hispanic and Latino neighbors as optional. Looking at kindergarteners, eighth graders and high school graduates, Guttierez noted that four out of every five of Arizona’s youngest group is Hispanic or Latino. While they’re the ones who form an emotional connection to their sport first, bringing their families along with them, they also become the eighth graders who use a team’s social media, view its content and buy its merchandise. By the time they graduate high school, they’re either playing for the team’s farm system or working in its front office. “The reason that that is one of our growth cohorts isn't just because I'm Latina, and Xavier is Latino, and our owners Latino; it's because of the data,” said Tania Moreno, the Coyotes’ svp of marketing. “It would be really bad business, as Xavier likes to say, if we didn't look at the data and look at the numbers of who our market really is.” One stick at a time After Moreno’s research found that Spanish-speaking grandparents wanted to bond with their grandkids around sports, the Coyotes launched their Los Howlitos free Spanish-language hockey clinics for children. Guttierez, meanwhile, began talking to schools, the Boys & Girls Club, and the local sheriff’s office about starting community hockey clinics that would put a stick in kids’ hands and start them along the continuum where street hockey leads to roller hockey and, eventually, a place on the ice. “My very first hockey clinic was in a community that the Coyotes had never been in, and it was a bunch of 6- to 8-year-old kids,” Guttierez said. “All of them took sticks, balls and T-shirts—and it was probably about 100 of them—and all of a sudden it’s, ‘I want to go to a hockey game.’” Ideally that’s just the first step. The team is attempting to bring another long-overlooked Arizona contingent, women, into the fold by recruiting local U.S. hockey silver medalist Lyndsey Fry to run its Arizona Kachinas girls and women’s hockey programs. The Coyotes have also used their connections with Univision to give local businesses their ad space on the network. How the NHL’s Seattle Kraken Built a Brand Before Playing Their First Game Mixed howls But as much as Gutierrez, Moreno and the Coyotes marketing team want to change the dialogue, some organizational inconsistency remains. The team’s proposed move to Tempe sends mixed signals about its push for inclusion. While there is no outright majority in either Phoenix or Glendale, Tempe is 57% non-Hispanic white. The marketing push also hasn’t quelled rumors about the team potentially leaving Arizona. In early December, Forbes SportsMoney managing editor Mike Ozanian indicated that the team might be for sale, with interested parties in Houston. https://twitter.com/MikeOzanian/status/1466400530528354304 While Houston is the fourth largest city in the country and, at nearly 75% non-white, is one of its most diverse, the Coyotes deny they’re leaving Arizona anytime soon. "This is false,” according to a team statement sent to Adweek. “Totally false. We're not selling. We're not moving. The Coyotes are 100% committed to playing in Arizona.” According to Forbes, the Coyotes are the least valuable franchise in the NHL at $285 million and falling. At the time this was written, the Coyotes were mired at the bottom of the NHL’s Central Division with both the fewest wins (5, tied with the New York Islanders) and points (12). Yet Gutierrez and Moreno remain optimistic, pointing to the success of two of the NHL’s newest franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle. The Las Vegas Golden Knights appealed not only to tourists on vacation but locals who the team had seen through the tragedy of a mass shooting and the triumph of an ensuing Stanley Cup Finals appearance. The Seattle Kraken built their brand during the pandemic through social media storytelling. If relatively new NHL teams can build all that from nothing, Gutierrez believes the Coyotes’ years of nothing can be turned into something. “It was starting from scratch and saying, ‘How do we do this?’” Gutierrez said. “And let's be humble about knowing that we don't have all the answers.” ‘Real Change Requires a Movement, Not a Moment’—NHL EVP on Diversity in Hockey